Facebook is a powerful marketing tool that is currently underutilized by small businesses. In most cases, a small business owner can get exposure for their business on Facebook for free or at a very minimal cost depending on if you choose to utilize some of their paid advertising opportunities. 500 Million plus users, Facebook is quickly becoming a marketing powerhouse for small businesses, getting into the local search and local deals space, in addition to providing a social network for small business owners to connect and establish relationships with their target customers and community at large.

As a small business owner, when you think about marketing your business, you most likely think about paid advertising, but the internet offers so many different opportunities to market your business for free, all you need to do is make the time to do so, if you don’t have the budget to spend on advertising.

Here are the Top Five ways that you can market your business on Facebook for FREE.

1. Create a Facebook Page for Your Business. It is very easy to create a Facebook page for your business. Simply go to Facebook.com and select the option on the right to create a page for a business, band or celebrity.

• When creating your Facebook page it is very important that you fill it out in its entirety. • Start with the Info Section, where your profile will be visible to those that like or become a fan of your page. • List all of your contact information including phone, email, website address and blog if you have one. • When filling out a description of your business, use this as an opportunity to highlight key factors about your business by providing content that those that are reading would find of value by highlighting what you do, the problems you solve and the solutions that you offer.

Naturally, the first people that you would invite are your friends and customers and prospects that you may have email addresses for. Many people say how can my friends help me, but the truth is, if you use Facebook in the right way, when you connect with your friends, their friends will become aware of you, as well as your friends, friends, friends and that’s how you build your network an following.

Another way to enlarge your reach and invite more of your target customers is to join groups that host events for people of your target market. Once you have joined, the next step will be to invite those people to like or become a fan on your business page.

You can find groups on Facebook, by simply using the search utility and typing in a key term that describes the group that you will like to join. If your business is locally based, it will be a good idea to type in your city. Once it returns a list of groups you can click through them, read their descriptions and if it seems like a good fit, you can simply click the Join Group button to Join that group.

A good idea would be to look at the members of the group to see if they are indeed made up of your target customers before you join.

Also, don’t be afraid to join groups with people who provide the same service as you do. In many cases, you can form strategic partnership and get referrals from these people as well.

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3. Keep Your Status Updated at least Once a Day To be effective at marketing on Facebook for Free, you have to stay connected to your network. Whenever you update your status, those that are a part of your Facebook Page will also be notified via the Facebook Feed that an update has been posted.

It’s a great idea to post a combination of useful tips, success stories, customer raves, promotions, inspirations. As you become more involved you need to pay attention to want your fans/friends responds to the best and do more of that.

4. Contribute. To continuously stay present of mind in front of those that have connected with your business on Facebook and to start generating leads from your Facebook marketing it is important for you to contribute. As you contribute, overtime you will see that it starts to pay off in leads and referrals and sales.

A few ways you can contribute is by posting how to useful articles, videos, answering questions, and positioning yourself as an expert as well as commenting on the status of your friends and fans alike. Remember the more you contribute the more exposure you get.

The key is becoming a familiar fixture in the minds of the people that you are connected with, and to be the person they think of first when they or a friend is in need of your products/or services.

5. Host an Event. Yes, it’s true you can even host an event on Facebook. Once you have a good following of lets say 100 people or more. It might be time to consider hosting an event. A great way to host an event is to have a free teleseminar or webinar and announce it on your Facebook page .

Once you publish your event on your Facebook page, others will see it. You also want to encourage them to share it with their friends of family. For example if you are an insurance agent or financial planner, you can hold an event where you talk about “Five Easy Ways to Save For Retirement”, if you are a wedding planner “You can talk about How to get a Platinum Wedding on a Beer Budget! If you are in construction, you can talk about Tips for Lowering Your Heating Bill in the winter or How to Double the Value of Your Home by remodeling it! These are all things that people may be interested in, and you will be positioning yourself as an expert, and it won’t cost you but your time. What’s more you will have the opportunity to speak directly to your prospects.

The key to successfully marketing your business on Facebook for Free is to start by building relationships and gaining credibility and expert status. Then ultimately you will become the go to person, you will also see an increase in traffic to your website, as people research you and reach out to you about your services.